TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/072489/07248900.062

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 9KB | 159 lines

SHOW BUSINESS, Page 52

"Absolutely an Actor. Born to It"

Laurence Olivier: 1907-1989

By Richard Corliss


    "I believe in the theater," said the new Baron of Brighton in
his maiden speech to the House of Lords in 1971. "I believe in it
as the first glamourizer of thought." That was the theater to
Laurence Olivier, and that was Olivier to all who fell under the
glamorous spell he wove. More immediately and lastingly than any
other modern actor, Olivier picked words off the playscript page,
flung them passionately into the dark and secured them in the minds
of theatergoers. Brilliance, for once, had its rewards. As critic
Kenneth Tynan proclaimed in 1966, "Laurence Olivier at his best is
what everyone has always meant by the phrase `a great actor.'"
Director, producer, prime mover of Britain's National Theater,
embodier of the most vital Shakespearean heroes, Olivier at his
death last week at 82 held undisputed claim to yet another title:
the 20th century's definitive man of the theater.

    Like the century he almost spanned, Olivier the actor displayed
turbulent energy, embraced awesome excess; his genius and his folly
fed each other spectacularly. Said Albert Finney, who in 1959
understudied Olivier as Coriolanus: "He makes the climaxes higher,
and he makes the depths of it lower, than you feel is possible in
the text."

    So too with the text and texture of Olivier's life and career.
He was the son of a fifth-generation Anglican clergyman, yet he
found his soul upon the wicked stage. The foremost classical actor
of his time, he attained his first eminence as a West End matinee
idol, and his second as a Hollywood dreamboat in Wuthering Heights
(1939) and Rebecca (1940). Though he pored over scripts like a new
critical scholar, he was an irrepressibly physical stage performer,
scaling balconies and executing dizzying falls with Fairbanksian
elan. Like many men, Olivier housed a congeries of contradictions;
uniquely, he transformed them into living art.

    At the apex of his stage career -- in the mid-'40s, when he
and Ralph Richardson led the Old Vic company through triumphal
seasons in London and New York City -- Olivier could spread out the
banquet of those contradictions in a single evening. In Henry IV,
Part I, he was the stuttering, heroic Hotspur; in Part II, the
cagey-senile Justice Shallow. The curtain would fall on his
Oedipus, with its searing scream of self-revelation; after
intermission he would mince on as Mr. Puff, the giddy paragraphist
of Sheridan's The Critic. It was all part of a 70-year striptease
in which this consummate quick-change artist always had one more
veil to remove, and proof of what director Peter Glenville called
Olivier's "greed for achievement."

    He first showed that good greed at age nine, on the auditorium
stage of All Saints' School in London. In the audience was Sybil
Thorndike, then an Old Vic leading lady, who told Larry's father,
"But this is an actor. Absolutely an actor. Born to it." From a
list of his acting credits at school (Maria in Twelfth Night, Kate
in The Taming of the Shrew), one imagines that his teachers had
already spotted what director Elia Kazan would later cite as
Olivier's "girlish" quality. Throughout his career -- as Lord
Nelson in That Hamilton Woman, as Richard III, as the homicidal
mystery writer in Sleuth -- Olivier would bat his eyes at the
audience, soliciting its surrender. But belying those feminine eyes
were the cruel, pliant lips, and on them the smile of a tiger too
fastidious to lick his chops in anticipation of a tasty meal.

    Emlyn Williams once remarked that Olivier had "always seemed
to be at the height of his career." Not quite so. In 1929, his
first regular stint of acting in the West End, he was in and out
of half a dozen indifferent plays before Noel Coward cast him as
the "other man" in Private Lives. Four years later, in Hollywood,
he was fired from his first A-picture role as Greta Garbo's lover
in Queen Christina. Once again Coward rescued Olivier, casting him
in Theatre Royal (1934) as a dashing figure fashioned after John
Barrymore, whose lightning sexuality Olivier had long admired and
would often emulate.

    In 1935 John Gielgud, the leading exponent of romantic
classicism, hired Olivier to play Romeo to Gielgud's Mercutio. Then
they swapped roles, and critics hailed the young boulevardier as
a rising tragedian. Years later, when asked to enumerate his
rival's strengths, Gielgud acutely replied, "Attention to detail;
complete assurance in his conception of character; athleticism;
power; and originality."

    By 1943, when Olivier, as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, was
granted leave to make a film of Henry V, he had synthesized all
his gifts. Here was a Henry true both to Shakespeare and to movie
spectacle -- a Henry with Napoleonic martial wiles and the careless
charm of a Cary Grant. It was the first of Olivier's three
Shakespeare films as producer, director and star. In Hamlet (1948),
which won him Oscars for best picture and best actor, he turned the
melancholy prince into a manic-depressive swashbuckler and Elsinore
into a film-noir castle. Richard III (1955) was his most masterly
and entertaining picture. Looking eerily Nixonian, Olivier's
Richard murdered with a style that suggested both deformed ambition
and a sly sexual perversity. All three films convinced moviegoers
that sentiments expressed in iambic pentameter could be matters of
life and death.

    Except in the Shakespeare films, Olivier in this period usually
appeared with Vivien Leigh, his wife from 1940 to 1960. They had
fallen in love as co-stars of the 1937 film Fire over England;
toured the U.S. in a Romeo and Juliet so poorly received that they
had to refund money to angry ticket holders; returned to Broadway
in 1951 in Antony and Cleopatra and Caesar and Cleopatra (dubbed
by wags "Two on the Nile"). By the mid-'50s this beautiful actress
was tobogganing into mental illness and Olivier was in desperate
need of a new challenge. Luck smiled from a surprising direction:
the angry young Royal Court Theater. As Archie Rice in John
Osborne's The Entertainer (1957, filmed in 1959), a great actor
found himself playing a seedy music-hall comic in a tantalizing
blend of parody and autobiography.

    Yet Olivier always remained a Proteus of the footlights; he
bent, folded, spindled, mutilated himself to fit his dynamic
conception of the roles. In early Shakespearean parts, Olivier
padded his legs so as to look good in tights. In 1945 he went to
a gym to sculpt those legs into felicitous muscularity before
playing Oedipus in a Greek kilt. To deepen his natural tenor voice
into Othello's baritone, he studied with a vocal coach and was soon
speaking a full octave lower. His most faithful theatrical aid was
the makeup kit. Said Coward: "I cannot think of any other living
actor who has used such vast quantities of spirit gum with such
gleeful abandon."

    There was no Method to his masquerades. Graduates of the Actors
Studio might psychoanalyze themselves into their roles; Olivier
worked from the outside in, often finding character in caricature,
refusing only to err on the side of restraint. Although it was what
made him exciting to watch, his outsize playing occasionally
exceeded conventional interpretations. Olivier's Othello (1964,
filmed the following year), with thick ruby lips and rolling
Jamaican cadences, provoked charges of racism. His Shylock (1970,
televised in 1974) was found by critic Clive James to resemble
Disney's stingy zillionaire Scrooge McDuck.

    Late in his life Olivier might have retired on his laurels:
the knighthood in 1946, the life peerage in 1970, the thanks of
several nations and generations. But in 1974 nature played a dirty
trick on this man for whom strength and agility were two tools of
genius. Olivier was struck with dermatopolymyositis, a crippling
degeneration of skin and muscular tissue. Although he had been
robbed of the energy to seize the stage eight times a week, Olivier
could not stop working; he even "appeared," as a recorded hologram,
in the 1986 West End musical Time. He guested in British
mini-series (Brideshead Revisited, Lost Empires). And he worked for
any movie producer with gall and a ton of money. Dozens of robust
cartoons followed: MacArthurs and moguls (The Betsy), wily old Jews
(The Boys from Brazil) and scheming Nazis (Marathon Man), all
shamelessly strutting their charisma, all fulfilling critic Alan
Brien's dictum that "there is a kind of bad acting of which only
a great actor is capable."

    Olivier was still capable of greatness. In 1982 he answered a
last call from Shakespeare, playing King Lear for TV, in a
magnificent portrayal that was also a literally death-defying gift
to posterity. The boy of nine, mesmerized by the poetry of a 16th
century playwright, was now a frail old man of 75, leaving a record
of his transcendence for the electronic age and ages to come. The
greatest actor of the century knew how to leave them begging for
more.